“Six Feet Under” is a funny, warm, offbeat HBO drama made all the more delightful because it’s about a family of undertakers–hardly your standard TV clan. Each episode opens with a ghoulishly hilarious death. The Fisher family then tends to the survivors, once it gets over its own crises. In one episode, the Fishers hide the fact that a man who died in a dough mixer is still missing a foot because 16-year-old Claire Fisher (Lauren Ambrose) stole the appendage to get back at a boyfriend who bragged about how she sucked his toes. “In a lot of ways, it’s ‘Knots Landing’ set in a funeral home,” says Ball. “Six Feet Under” often feels like a funny version of “American Beauty,” with its darkly humorous look at a family trying to figure out how they fit into each other’s lives and the world. But there’s no escaping the fact that Ball has landed back on the small screen. Why? “If you’d asked me that a year ago, I’d have said because I have 18 months left on my development deal,” says Ball. “But I’d be hard pressed to find a motion-picture studio that would give me the kind of freedom to tell a story that HBO does. When I turned in the pilot script, they had one note: could you make it a little messier, a little more f—ed up? I was like, ‘Yeah!’ "
Ball has always made unconventional career choices. He was writing off-Broadway plays in the early ’90s when a couple of TV producers hired him for “Grace Under Fire”–even though he’d never written for the screen. He’d never written a movie, either, before he came up with “American Beauty.” He’s still shocked that a little-known playwright from Marietta, Ga., somehow managed to walk off with an Academy Award the first time out. “I usually watch the Oscars at home with friends, drinking martinis and throwing socks at the TV,” he says. “And all of a sudden, I was there. It was really weird. The only way I could get through it was to keep a flask in my pocket. I was such white trash.” The Academy will be equally pleased to hear that Ball keeps his Oscar on a shelf in his West Hollywood home–outfitted in a pink Barbie jacket. “He looks so pretentious,” Ball says. “The jacket cuts him down to size a little bit.”
But Ball isn’t thumbing his nose at the movies altogether. He’s working on a murder mystery about a 1960s Cleveland policeman for Tom Hanks called “Mr. Downtown.” Earnest Tom Hanks and irreverent Alan Ball–that seems like an odd couple. “He came to me, and I thought it was an interesting notion,” says Ball. “A lot of people wanted to meet with me after ‘American Beauty,’ and everyone would go, ‘You are the perfect writer for this.’ And then they would tell me the idea and I would think, that’s a movie I would walk out on. Why do you think I’d be the perfect writer for that?” Then again, Ball is used to people who don’t quite get what he’s all about. “I asked my mom what she thought of ‘Six Feet Under’ and she said, ‘It’s filthy, filthy, filthy’,” Ball says. “But that’s what she says to me. I think she’s very proud.” After all, she did agree to do a cameo in the series pilot. And Ball was nice enough not to turn her into a corpse.
